New Socially Devoted Q1: Brands on Twitter Are Still Slow in Responding, But Getting Better

Twitter brands are delivering better social customer care than ever. But many are still making a big mistake that is hurting the value of their social customer care.

In Q1 of this year, as part of our Socially Devoted results, we’ve
witnessed a huge increase to Response Time for questions on Twitter, and a
slight but significant increase (3%) in the overall platform Response Rate.

Despite the good news, there’s still some bad news: 10 million user posts
that mention a brand are being ignored each quarter, among which there are
1.5. million unanswered direct questions.. Depending on the industry, that
means up to 30 to 130 per hour. That’s a lot of potentially
dissatisfied users!

Though this is a trend that we see slowly getting better in the long term,
from our quarterly results, still this is not an acceptable state of affairs. So
why the lag?

There are a number of reasons behind this. But one thing that we have seen
consistently is big brands using dedicated support handles for social customer
care. On these accounts, these big brands respond often and quickly.

However, there still lies a problem. What happens is: users have no idea of
the existence of a dedicated support handle. The user looks for help at the
official handles, and doesn’t receive any response, let alone even being told
that there is a support handle. The end result: brands are confusing customers
by creating multiple handles, and overcomplicating their social presence.

Here are examples of some large brands (including XBox, Vodafone UK, Delta,
Amazon, and Nike), which maintain an official Twitter handle and a support
handle.

As you can see, many users are asking questions to the main handle, without
being aware of the support handle. That’s thousands of ignored questions per
quarter, and hundreds per day!

However, there’s an easy solution: brands should either use one handle,
for both their brand communication AND for social customer care (our
recommendation). OR, they can clearly communicate, on their main Twitter handle,
that users with questions should go to the support handle for assistance.

By just removing this confusion from your brand communication, we believe
that brands will see a huge increase in the value of their social
customer care.

How are you conducting your social customer care on Twitter? Do you have
one official handle, and one dedicated support handle? Share your
thoughts below.

Sign in for more insights!

Subscribe to Socialbakers Premium!

Just $50 / Month

For just $50/month, you’ll be the best-prepared marketer around. With Socialbakers Premium Reports, you get exclusive access to deep breakdowns of top content in your region, 2 weeks earlier than anyone else.

Login with Facebook

The content on this page is available only to logged-in users. Simply log in with your Facebook account to gain access to all materials in the Socialbakers Resources. Once logged-in, you will then be able to access and download various types of studies, reports, articles and other types of content for free.